What are we to make of IBM's silence about its desktop Linux policy?

A while back, chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano challenged the company to move its desktops to Linux by the end of 2005. What's clear is that this hasn't happened and doesn't look like happening. And there's probably a good reason.

BusinessWeek: Linus Torvalds once led a ragtag band of software geeks. Not anymore. Here's an inside look at how the unusual Linux business model increasingly threatens Microsoft.

In battles over operating system superiority, emotions run high. Capabilities are assembled like armies and run out on discussion boards to face the flames. So let me say this now: your operating system is probably better than mine. Most modern operating systems are better than FreeDOS when considered by any objective criteria. FreeDOS doesn't multitask, doesn't surf the Internet easily, isn't great for multimedia productions, and doesn't even do Windows. But I love it anyway.

Yeah, why? Your typical modern Mac comes with all the Unixy goodness you could ever need, right? But there are a bunch of Linux PPC distributions that you can, if you feel the need, install on your Apple hardware.

In part two of this ever-expanding MIDI series, a look at various sequencers, from Rosegarden to seq24.

When coding a program, one of the best ways to show users that an event has happened is to produce sounds. That's why sound is now present in almost every program. Every operating system has different sound systems and APIs to access the sound card, so that no low-level coding is required to use the sound device. Programmers have many different choices concerning which system to use, especially under Linux -- and maybe that's the problem. This article will illustrate free sound architectures under Linux, as well as the different interfaces a programmer can use.

When Microsoft announced victory in its battle with open source for the hearts, minds and wallets of Newham council last month, the press naturally asked to see the report Newham's decision was allegedly based on. Er, yes, the report would be forthcoming, we were told. So we gave it a few days, and asked again. And again. And again. But mysteriously, although Microsoft executives are prepared to shout from the rafters about what's in the report, the report itself never seems to arrive.

Medicine: The open-source model is a good way to produce software, as the example of Linux shows. Could the same collaborative approach now revitalise medical research too?

Red Hat's Eclipse Engineering team has freed the popular integrated development environment from its ties to a proprietary Java Virtual Machine.

A Linux thin-client workstations, terminal-server combination is giving enterprises something to consider on the desktop.